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My Author #TikTok Experiment (so far)

3/19/2022

In my last post, I hinted that to ramp up my marketing strategy for my books, I might get brave and start doing some TikToks. Well, I did. I’ve been at it for two solid months now and have done 35 posts. I wanted to share with you how this experiment is going so far and what I’ve learned.

I avoided using this app for a long time for a couple reasons: it seemed to be mostly for young people, and I knew it would be a big time-suck. My daughter and a friend of mine at work insisted that there was much more to it than teens lip-syncing songs and dancing, so I finally gave it a chance and put the app on my phone. It took a moment, but the algorithm discovered the stuff that entertains me. I was wrong about it just being for young people. I was right about it being a time-suck. It’s really easy to get trapped on that app and not even notice how much time is passing.

As for making my own content, that’s a whole different story. I have a couple friends who are doing tremendously well on TikTok, but they aren’t authors. They’re doing well because of the persona or message they're putting across.

What on earth would anyone want to see this middle-aged indie author doing or saying? Obviously, I’m on there to promote my books, but so are thousands of other writers. No one wants to see outright sales pitches, so I had to find my way of expressing myself. In addition to writing, I’m also an actress/singer with a huge love a musical theater. I decided to combine my passions and create content where I would sing showtunes that either go thematically with a book of mine or that reflect things that happen in an author’s life.

Honestly, I thought this gimmick would be cuter than it is, but it’s only getting a lukewarm response. This is actually my most viewed and liked one where I'm singing. I have one that only has eleven views (sigh) and most have less than ten likes. (Oh, and did I mention my book Songwriter Night won an award? Yay!)

My daughter told me I’d be more successful following the trends on the app, doing some lip-synching, and using trending sounds. That makes sense, and while I’ve done a couple of those, I feel like I’m just one of a million when I do them. It's fun but feels insincere.

This one of me hearing favorite songs from the 80s was fun to make, but it needed 7 different locations in my house! Ack!

I’m also still figuring out how to make these videos. I have a small house that doesn’t have a lot of great places to shoot anything with a good background. I get embarrassed to shoot these when other members of my family are home.

I don’t wear makeup regularly, but I have to put some on for these or I look like death warmed over. So, I try to shoot a couple at a time.

Editing them together is challenging and takes more time than I thought. Most of the effects don’t work unless you record directly onto the app. I’ve edited a couple longer videos on Canva and uploaded them. It’s taking an enormous amount of time to put these things together, and some of them are literally only a few seconds long.

The pro tip is that people should be putting content up at least 4-6 times PER DAY to grow a following. I’m lucky if I can do 4 a week. It’s honestly so much to do even the small amount of content I’ve created. I’m absolutely enjoying the challenge and happy with what I’ve done, but I can’t sustain this pace, not with a full-time job and other commitments. Making TikTok content has stolen away a lot of my writing time and attention to other forms of marketing. A month from now, I start directing a big musical that goes up in June. I will have zero free time on my hands for making silly videos of me singing or lip-synching.

And is it even working? Not yet. I’m still new on there, but in two months I’ve only gained 40 followers. I haven’t topped 250 views on a video. The likes are going up for each video, but the most I’ve gotten is 24. That was for one of the “trending” style ones that has nothing to do with my writing, and I think most of those people liking it were creepers. As far as I can tell, I haven’t sold any books due to these videos.

I’ve shared some as reels on Instagram, and it’s interesting how different the responses are to these videos from one app to the other. I can tell that my Instagram followers are more interested in my singing/personal ones than the TikTok community. Also, it’s very clear that short, punchy videos do so much better than long, talky ones no matter which app I use.

I’m not done with my experiment. I’m still at the start of it, and I’m curious to see where it will go. I’m not convinced, however, that this is ultimately the best way to spend my precious creative time. But hey, I am posting a lot more on there than here on this blog, so please come follow me. I’d love to know what your experiences are on TikTok, either as a consumer or a content creator. Leave a comment below.

2021 In the Books

12/28/2021

It’s time once again for my annual wrap up of the year: what I’ve been doing creatively and what I’ve been reading. It feels like I just wrote this post for the end of 2020, and if you scroll back through my very inactive blog, it sure looks like I just wrote it. Nevertheless, a whole year has indeed gone by, one filled with ups and downs.

The year began on a big high as I figured out how to publish the sweet romantic Nashville inspired audiobook I’d worked on so hard with songwriter Caleb Dinger and a cast of talented Nashville actors. We chose to go through Findaway Voices, and that made Songwriter Night: A Musical Romance available on every audiobook platform, the biggies being GooglePlay, Apple Books, Chirp, Kobo, Audiobooks.com and Audible. Yes, you can even borrow it from your public library.

Caleb and I got to do an interview on Today in Nashville, a local daytime news show, with a song from the show sung by our leading actors Jack Forte and Caylin Maguire. We got some wonderful reviews, and it was all very exciting.

We even did a “Listening Dinner Theatre” event in the spring where people bought tickets to enjoy a nice meal while listening to the 3-hour story. It was a blast, and I loved watching people react to everything and sing along to the song at the end.

Next, I worked on releasing Songwriter Night in ebook and print. It took a little revising because the story had originally been written in script format. I did a guest blog post about that process for Stacy Juba’s Shortcuts for Writers. The book version got some lovely reviews as well.

Once that came out, I took some time trying to figure out what to write next. I started and stopped three different novels. I liked the ideas behind all of them, but I was struggling with what my next steps as an author should be. The women’s fiction novel I wrote in 2020, Attitude of Grace, has gotten a couple full requests from agents and one publisher, but it hasn’t passed through the gatekeepers yet. I feel like that book will eventually find a home, and I want to have some solid foundation on another novel in the same genre to follow it.

In the end, however, my heart urged me to continue the love stories I started with my Nashville songwriters. So, I wrote a sequel called Songwriter Showcase. It was a blast to write because I had the voices of the actors from the audiobook in my head, and I could hear how they would read the lines. I also mined through the collection of songs I’d written in my twenties and used several of them in the story.

I released Songwriter Showcase with little fanfare in October and haven’t had much time to do any marketing for it. I’m hoping to fix that once we get past the holidays. (If you’re interested in review copies of either book, please let me know.) I also hope to record some of the new songs that I wrote for this story. It is a tremendous amount of work to record a full cast, musical audiobook, and this story is almost twice as long as the last one. I’m still trying to figure out a way to do it that will work. I’m toying with the idea of recording a staged reading of it, but I haven’t run that by Caleb or my actors yet. I’ll definitely let y’all know what happens.

In the new year I plan to revisit these characters once again to adapt Songwriter Night so that we can perform it as a live stage show. After that, I think I will go back to one of the novels I deserted last spring.

All of that seems exciting creatively, but I'll confess that my sales for all my books have been especially low this year. Nothing is working, and I’ve considered hanging it all up multiple times. I’m going to have to explore new ways to get attention to these titles. I’ve been trying to avoid it, but a TikTok account may be in my near future.

The theater side of me got to wake up once again after a long, long 18 months. My husband and I were asked to be in an original musical written by composer Michael Kurek called Dear Miss Barrett back in June. We were very proud to be part of this world premiere performance here in Tennessee. Immediately after that show, we FINALLY started rehearsals for the long-awaited Mamma Mia. We performed in August at The Larry Keeton Theatre, and it was SO MUCH FUN! I have never had so much fun doing a show, and there were so many tears at the end.

The woman playing Rosie to my Tanya in Mamma Mia was slated to direct the Christmas show, and she asked me to assistant direct and choreograph Miracle in Bedford Falls (a musical based on the film It’s a Wonderful Life). That turned out to be another magical experience that again left me in tears on closing night (only one week ago as I write this). I loved the show so much, and the cast was so delightful.

I’m not entirely sure what my theater plans are for 2022 at this point, but I have my fingers crossed for more opportunities to direct and at least one chance to perform.

And now for my 2021 Books of the Year list.

According to my Goodreads Challenge, I read 39 books, and I have two more I should finish before the new year. Once again, my reading genres were all over the place. I can’t help it. I like stories of all kinds. My list is heavier on audiobooks because I listen during my long commutes. I read a little YA, romance, women's fiction, some thrillers, and a couple non-fiction works.

Biggest Surprise: Girls with No Names by Sandra Burdick. Like usual, my biggest surprise came from plucking a book out of a Bookbub sale notice. This historical novel about the condition of life for wayward girls in 1910 was fascinating. It’s a heart-wrenching tale, and it had me captured from beginning to end. I listened to the audiobook for this, and it was expertly read by 3 different actresses. I highly recommend it if you like historical fiction.

Best Self-Published or Small Press Book: Okay, I deserve a little slap on the wrist for this, but I didn’t read many self-published or small press books this year. I know. As an indie, I should be ashamed. I will do better next year. The one I enjoyed the most was A36 by Teri Polen. It’s a YA science fiction/dystopian novel about a society that farms genetic codes from people and sells them. It’s very exciting with great fight scenes and a cast of characters that is multi-cultural and inclusive of LGBT characters. I am definitely looking forward to the sequel.

Best Audiobook: This is hard. I’ve listened to so many good audiobooks this year. I’m going with Stephen King’s Billy Summers. I always love a good King novel, and I read 3 of them this year. The narration in this is fantastic, and the story zips along. It is not a horror novel at all but more of a suspense story. It’s interesting caring so much for a character who is also a hired assassin. If you love the TV show Barry, you will love this book.

As a runner up, though, I’m going to have to say the nonfiction book All About All About Eve by Sam Staggs. If you are a fan of this classic movie or classic films at all, you will get a kick out of it. You have to listen to it – not read it, because the narrator Donald Corren’s impressions of Betty Davis, Marilyn Monroe, et all are a kick.

And best made-only-for-audiobook book (besides Songwriter Night *wink*) was Call Me Maybe by Cara Bastone. I laughed out loud multiple times listening to this fun romantic comedy and its sequel Sweet Talk.

Best Large Press Book: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins. This book is a prequel to The Hunger Games series and the origin story of President Snow. I know that a lot of people didn’t like it as much as I did, but I found it riveting. I also love when Santino Fontana narrates books. He’s amazing. I just wish he’d sung the songs instead of reciting them.

Best Book of the Year: The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. I suppose one of these years my favorite book won’t be historical fiction, but that genre always seems to score highest with me. It’s not often an audiobook has me weeping all the way to and from work while I drive. This one did it. This story about a family striving to survive the Great Depression tore my heart out and left it raw. Beautifully written and so epic. I can’t recommend it enough.

Have you read or listened to any of these books? What did you think? What were your favorite books of the year? I’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment. And, of course, if you’re looking for something fun to read to start off 2022, pop around my website and see if any of my books appeal to you.

Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’s a happier, healthier one!

Songwriter Showcase Cover Reveal

10/10/2021

My last post was six months ago, and if you read it you know I was going through a struggle over how or if I should proceed with my writing. Well, that battle continues to rage in me, but my determination to create seems to keep winning. After three starts on full length novels, I decided that I really wanted to continue the story of my Nashville songwriters and wrote a sequel to Songwriter Night: A Musical Romance.

This book, Songwriter Showcase, wound up being almost twice as long as the first story, although the main plot still takes place in one evening.

My plan is to release the book on November 9th, and it is available for pre-order on Kindle now!

Here is the cover for the new book! Do you like it?

What's it about?

Emotions run high and jealousy reigns when the members of songwriter group night enter a talent competition against each other.

It’s been a couple months since Trish attended her first songwriter night and started her relationship with Lyle. Things have been going nicely for them but haven’t been quite as smooth for Odetta and Neil. These new relationships are put to the test when all four of them enter a big songwriting competition where the finalists will perform in a showcase in front of a panel of judges. The winner will get an offer of agent representation and a possible recording deal. Now they’re all in competition, trying to figure out how to support each other while still wanting to win.

It doesn’t help that both Lyle and Neil feel slighted because Trish and Odetta are singing songs they’ve written about former relationships. There’s also a striking young woman named Carly who could definitely snag the prize away from any of them.

Oh, and one more problem. Aiden Bronson is one of the judges.

Is the love between Trish and Lyle or Odetta and Neil strong enough to survive this tense night? No matter the outcome?

It's now my intention to do a series of these Nashville Songwriter Romance novellas, exploring the romantic and platonic relationships between the main characters from the original story and adding some new characters as it goes along.

Each book will continue to feature song lyrics, but at this point I'm not planning to do full cast audiobooks for the sequels. I would like at some point to record the songs, however. So, stay tuned for that.

If you haven't read Songwriter Night: A Musical Romance, I'm keeping the price at 99c for the ebook for now, and the audiobook is still at a low $5.25 at most audiobook retailers. It's gotten great reviews, and people seem to really enjoy it. I'm crossing my fingers for the possibility of putting it on stage as a live musical sometime next year.

What am I working on next?

I wrote Songwriter Showcase on weekends between rehearsals for two back-to-back musical productions this past summer. We just finished up Mamma Mia (at long last) two weeks ago. So sad that it's over, but so happy we finally got to do the show!

I'm about to go into rehearsals for a Christmas show that I'm choreographing and assistant directing. That'll keep me pretty busy through the remainder of the year.

Next up for Lyle, Trish and the gang will be Songwriter Session, but I need a break from them for a moment while I concentrate on marketing the existing titles. I'm planning to go back to one of the women's fiction novels that I started during the spring and see if I can make some progress on it. I'm still sending my other women's fiction novel Attitude of Grace to agents and publishers for consideration. It's a long, slow, painful process, but I have hope that this book about rediscovering yourself in mid-life will find its place in the world.

I'd love to hear from you! Comment to tell me what you think of the new book cover. What have you been reading lately? I'm always happy to answer any questions you may have. All the best to you!

What to do with My Precious Writing Time

4/25/2021

I haven’t done a blog post yet this year. I’ve thought of a couple ideas. I even wrote a short one a couple weeks back about my current reading habits, but then I thought it was pointless and didn’t post it. And that’s kind of the thing with me right now, I’m second guessing my ideas. I’m second guessing everything that I write and if anyone would be at all interested in reading it, whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, a Facebook update, or a novel.

Also, as a person who has always had to carve out time to write, I’m selective with how I use it. What would be the best use of these precious minutes? A blog post seems like the absolute worst use of my time as I don’t think I have many followers here and they take a lot of time to put together. Should I instead post more personal tweets and hope for interaction? Should I share more anecdotes about my daily life on my timeline? Should I go out and take more fun pictures or new selfies to share on Instagram?

Above all, which of my story ideas is the best one and is going to propel my career forward? Which one will stall it?

Like everyone, I want the likes and follows. I want the notifications to come in that people are enjoying my content. As a woman in her early fifties who is not famous should expect, I rarely get over 20 likes for any Instagram post. I'm lucky if I get two for a tweet, and I get more likes and comments about pictures of my daughter than myself on Facebook. When I post about my writing or share a new review? Crickets.

In 2020 I finished my first women’s fiction novel, and it centers around a woman who is 50. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written yet. I’m currently querying agents, and this is time consuming and frustrating. The waiting is literally driving me crazy because this is such a change of direction for me as a writer, and I want to know if it’s the right path for me. Should I write more of the same? My heart says yes. The story ideas that keep coming to me are in this same genre. And yet, I don’t see posts from agents suggesting that they are looking for this kind of material. Is this a futile effort?

The second half of 2020 was spent writing and recording Songwriter Night: A Musical Romance. This is a sweet romantic comedy novella that was made into a full cast audiobook with original songs. There is also a book version of it. I adore the way this project came out. It’s so cute and fun. I really expected that it would hit – especially with the theater community here in Nashville. The reality is: If it were a live show, we wouldn’t have even half the house for one performance filled. It hasn’t caught on – yet. I just lowered the price of the ebook to 99c. Hopefully that’ll make a difference, but I honestly want people to listen to the audiobook (which is only $5.25 btw). I don’t know how to market it.

So far, I’ve started writing three different books this year. One is adapting a screenplay I wrote back in 1999 into a novel. I got three chapters in before I got busy doing publicity for Songwriter Night. Thinking SN was going to catch on, I started writing a sequel to it called Songwriter Showcase. I got stuck mid-fourth chapter when I thought maybe this was a waste of time. Why write a sequel to a book no one is buying? So, last weekend I dove into a whole new idea. A romance novel for the GenX crowd, more in line with the novel I wrote last year. If that gets picked up, I’ll have a second one in the works. Seems logical.

It’s not writer’s block that I feel. I have ideas, and I want to write all of them. I’m more at a loss of which thing to write and what direction to take my writing career.

All of my self-publishing efforts have been novellas. The point of them was to have something extra and inexpensive to offer my readers in addition to the traditionally published YA novels. Should I take indie publishing more seriously and really invest the dollars and go full in? OR should I continue to be patient and keep pursuing this dream of being published with a major press and stop bothering with the indie content?

I posted this image on my Instagram earlier this month while I was making a half-hearted attempt at following the #authorlifemonth prompts. A friendly person commented, “Which story brings you the most joy and pleasure? White that one…it will be the best because your readers will be able to feel the story because your feelings are in it.” Very sweet advice, and not without merit. I like all my story ideas, though, and I will care about them as I write them. I also understand and appreciate the “Write what you love” and “write for yourself” anthems, but clearly my ideas aren’t super mainstream or what is selling best. So, do I keep doing this as a glorified hobby?

If you follow me at all, you know that I’m also an actress. (Yes, it’s community theater, so I also do that for no money. There is definitely a theme in my life of doing my art for the pure joy of it.) After a year and a half of no theater, I just got cast in a show. I start rehearsals in a week, and I’m slated to finally do Mamma Mia (which was cancelled last year) right after that. My writing time is going to get even more precious.

Sometimes I use up my writing time just scrolling social media, reading what other authors are doing. Or I make promo pictures for my existing projects (which is fun) and pretend I feel justified about using my writing time for marketing. My motivation for creating new words has been low and my mood even lower.

Then two things happened. After moaning about all this at work the other day, my assistant reminded me that in the eyes of others I am successful because I have in fact written multiple books and had them published - some with a publisher and some independently. No small feat.

I wrote a whole musical last year in collaboration with an amazing composer named Caleb Dinger and had it recorded by wonderful actors who gave their time and talent to the project. I work all day and then go do shows at night and on the weekends.

These are cool things to people who haven’t done them. She made me remember perspective. I’m not monetarily successful and may not have a huge following, but I am blessed to have a creative life.

The second thing that picked me up was a new 5-star review of Songwriter Night that popped up on Amazon yesterday. It was from author Teri Polen who has reviewed most of my books on her blog Books and Such. At the end of the review she wrote, “I’d love to see what happens to these characters in the future and hope the author considers expanding on the story.”

It was all I needed. Just that small bit of encouragement. I finished chapter four of the sequel yesterday and am about to start in on chapter five today. I have a cover concept already planned. There will be a sequel to the book version of Songwriter Night, and I actually have two more concepts for these characters after that. We’ll see what happens.

Maybe I’ll juggle back and forth between the three ideas I have. I’ve never done that before. Maybe I’ll just finish one at a time. Maybe I'll get a whole new idea and run with it instead. We’ll see how life changes as I wait for responses from agents and work to find more readers for my published books. All that said, it might be a minute before I post on my blog again. Thanks for stopping by to catch up with me. I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment or a question.

2020 in the Books

12/22/2020

It’s my annual end-of-the-year post where I share what I’ve been doing creatively and my favorite reads. I know this year has been challenging for so many, but I hope you are doing well and finding avenues for joy.

Click to go to Amazon listing

I had one book published this year - my very first picture book, Matching Costumes. It came out at the end of September, just in time for Halloween. It’s published by MacLaren Cochrane Publishing and is illustrated brilliantly by Cason Rome.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do any in-person events in October to promote it, nor was I able to get it to many reviewers prior to Halloween. So…. I’ll just pretend it’s debuting again next year. That’ll work, right?

My only self-publishing venture this year was a middle grade Christmas story called Sharing the Spotlight. This story was originally featured in the anthology Winter Wonder. I revised it and arranged it in chapter format. I put it on Kindle as a companion to my novel No One Needed to Know. I decided to do this on a whim while in quarantine at the end of November. I’m very grateful to the five people who downloaded it.

I did manage to get in one school visit this year. Believe it or not, it was right at the beginning of March, one week before the shutdown. It was my first high school visit, where I spoke about The Juniper Sawfeather Trilogy and gave some tips about recycling and reusing to help our environment.

I wrote quite a bit this year. Like many people, my work was closed for two months in the spring. I took that opportunity to finish the women’s fiction novel I’d been working on. It’s called Attitude of Grace and is about an aging amateur ballet dancer getting a second chance at love and life. I’m querying it to agents right now.

Working with composer Caleb Dinger, I wrote a sweet romantic musical called Songwriter Night. We recorded it as a full cast audio play. We’re working now on getting it published.

In addition to that, my co-author, Jeni Richard, finished her edits on our middle grade fantasy novel Dragon Surf. We have that out on query to agents as well.

As I’m in waiting mode for all of those projects, there’s not much else left to do but start writing another book. I’m only two chapters in at this point, but it’s a beginning. This new one is also a women’s fiction about a child care teacher (write what you know) with an It’s a Wonderful Life type of theme.

My other creative outlet—theater—has been on hold. I directed Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the beginning of the year. It closed the last weekend of February, and I had just started rehearsals for Mamma Mia when the theater had to close its doors. Fingers crossed that we can start live theater again in the new year. The set that my husband built for the show is finished and waiting for us to come back to it.

That's me in the orange, ready to play Tanya. I got my hair cut for the picture on 2/29 and haven't cut it since.

With so much more time at home than usual, you’d think I’d read more, but I didn’t. I definitely chose TV as my first mode of entertainment and watched more than I’ve ever watched in my whole life. There were some really good shows, though. Some of my favorites were Hollywood, The Royal Gambit, Mrs. America, Lovecraft Country, The Good Place, and Ted Lasso.

As far as reading, I did make my Goodreads Challenge goal – barely. There are a couple picture books on the list and I didn’t finish three books on there. Having had two months off from work, I didn’t listen to quite as many audiobooks as usual, and I also chose some of the short Audible Originals titles between my monthly free credits. My list is a bit all over the place with genre too. I made a point to read more women’s fiction and romance, as I feel it’s important to read the kinds of books you want to write. I also wanted to make a point to include more diversity on my list. There are still a few young adult and middle grade books on the list. As usual, there’s a good mix of books from indie authors, small press and large press.

If you want to see all the books I read this year, here’s my Goodreads challenge. I'm currently nearing the end of two more books, so I hope to pop this up to an even 40 before New Year's Eve.

Now, for my faves:

Best surprise:
The Wish List of Albie Young by Ruby Hummingbird

I picked this book up from a Bookbub listing without knowing much about it. The story sounded interesting and right in line with the kind of book was looking for. It was a charming story about an older woman rediscovering the joys of life thanks to discovering wish list left unfinished by a friend that passed away. I’d love to see this one made into a quiet movie starring someone like Judy Dench.

Best young adult or middle grade book:
The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee

I read a lot of great YA and children’s books this year. Historical fiction always rises to the top, though, and this one was no exception. It was about a Chinese girl and her father living secretly underneath a home in Atlanta in the early 1900s. She writes a column on manners for the local newspaper without anyone suspecting who she is. Fantastic book.

Best indie/small press book:
Top Producer by Laura Wolfe

Laura Wolfe had a big year with publishing three thrillers in one year. Two of her books are with a small publisher, and I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. This one she published herself (which I only found out today when researching that fact). This book about a young realtor and the conniving, ruthless woman she works for was thrilling and had me in its grip from beginning to end.

Best audiobook:
The Institute by Stephen King

The narrator! Santino Fontana! Oh, I love him so much. You might know him from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or the Broadway musical Tootsie. He read this book deliciously, and I didn’t want it to end. I will hunt down every book that he narrates and listen to them as well. (He narrates You, eek!) The plot about kidnapping children with supernatural powers was riveting too. Always and forever a Stephen King fan.

Best series:
The Diviners by Libba Bray

I started this series a couple years back, but getting a subscription to Audible helped me finally listen to the remaining books. This series is wonderful historic fantasy/horror. The characters are diverse and each one is fully drawn out and captivating. The spooky plotline is intricate, and the setting of New York in the 1920s is divine. On top of all that, the audiobook narrator, January LaVoy, is one of the best out there. I truly believed all of her voices for all the characters. Brilliant all the way around.

Best large press book:
The Subway Girls by Susie Orman Schnall

This book was another Bookbub surprise. It was on sale and looked interesting, so I snatched it up. It has a dual storyline between the 1940s and present day, following two young, ambitious women trying to figure out what they truly want from life. Although the title has the word “girls”, it's a book about women in their twenties. It also has a great afterward with some extra history to learn. I loved every word of this novel. If you like League of Their Own, this will appeal to you. I want it to be a movie or series. Come on Netflix, make this happen.

Best book of the year:
The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys

Ruta Sepetys can not fail. I’ve read every book by her and always will. She’s a true genius, and I’m so grateful I had an opportunity to go to one of her presentations about this book to hear her talk about it. This story is based on history I knew nothing about: the selling of babies in Spanish orphanages. As usual, her book was rich with detail while simultaneously moving fluidly through a complex and fascinating plot. Brilliant. You must read this. It’s classified as YA, but, as with every Sepetys book, it appeals to anyone who loves amazing historical fiction.

Well, there you go. My year in a nutshell. Here's hoping 2021 will find everyone healthy and by the time I write my year-end post next December, all the troubles will be behind us. In the meantime, get yourself a couple good books to read and cozy up for the winter ahead. Roam around my website and see if anything I've written or the books listed above appeal to you.

I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment and say hi. Wishing you all the best.

Making Halloween Costumes is More Fun than Wearing Them

10/25/2020

I’m not big on wearing costumes for Halloween. I haven’t attended a Halloween party since my early twenties. Even when my daughter was still little, and I took her trick-or-treating, I only dressed up one year. My husband and I went as the Phantom of the Opera and Christine. We gathered with the rest of the family to trick-or-treat in my parents’ neighborhood, and my brother, Steve, teased me for dressing up.

This shiny silver leotard was the base for soooo many costumes both with my dance troupe and for Halloween.

And that’s the thing. I think I have emotional scarring from being teased for the costumes I wore. I remember distinctly one year in elementary school when we were doing an “Outer Space” theme and we were invited to dress up as aliens for the day. I invented my own alien, something about rainbows. Like most of my Halloween costumes as a child, I used an old dance costume as the base and then added onto it. In this case I put a rainbow on my face and had bright ribbons. When I entered the classroom, nearly everyone had on something Star Wars related (it was new then). Expensive Yoda masks, plastic light sabers, so many Princess Leias. I was not an identifiable alien. I wasn’t even green. I got laughed at and picked on. So, I went to the bathroom and changed into my regular clothes and wiped off the makeup.

Of course, I wore costumes every Halloween throughout my childhood. Simple things like a witch or a pirate. Easy to assemble and recognize. When we were very little, my brothers and I still wore those costumes that came out of a box with the plastic face masks. The funny thing is, I don’t have any pictures. My family wasn’t great with taking lots of pictures anyway, but we have nothing. Not one single Halloween picture in my albums. The only pictures of me in costumes are from shows I was in.

Nowadays, if given the choice, I don’t wear a costume or I’ll do the simplest thing possible. I’m a big fan of wearing Halloween-themed T-shirts in October and have donned my Peanuts Halloween shirt every year for as long as I can remember. I’ve worked at my school for 15 Fall Festivals now and have only dressed up four times and always at the urging of a co-worker. This year I invested in a $5.00 pair of cat ears, and my assistant and I went way simple by wearing black and drawing cat faces on our masks. (In my defense, I do work with infants, so it’s hard to wear a complex costume and do my job.)

I just don’t love wearing costumes. It might be part of my intense shyness. Costumes draw attention. They draw judgement, whether good or bad. I feel the scrutiny, and it makes me uncomfortable. Did I dress up enough? Am I too dressed up? Do I look silly or stupid? Despite my experience in elementary school, I still prefer to make my own costumes as opposed to buying ones, even though I know I will feel awkward next to people who spent a lot more money on theirs. While I know this perception is skewed, that people just want to have fun at Halloween, old feelings create a barrier to my ability to enjoy this activity.

My daughter and her then boyfriend in matching costumes. We combed through every rack at Goodwill to find these outfits.

The weird thing is, I like making costumes. I do. I had a blast helping my daughter with her Halloween and spirit day costumes over the years. My stepdaughters love to cosplay, and I pitched in a couple times when they were still teenagers to help put something together for them. I’ve costumed myself and others for several plays I’ve done. If I knew how to sew better, I would love being an official costumer for theaters. Searching through Goodwill for the perfect piece to make an outfit work is a blast.

Perhaps this is why I wrote a book about a little girl making costumes for Halloween. I wanted to show the fun that can be had in creating a costume. The frustration of it not working. The elation when it finally comes out right. While Matching Costumes is for the very youngest of children and focuses more on the developmental skills of matching and sequencing, it also lends itself to discussion of making costumes out of things already in the house. If more families made their own costumes instead of purchasing them ready-made, maybe kids like me would feel less embarrassed or ashamed of their creations. Maybe a little girl dressed in rainbow colors claiming to an alien could be cheered for her imagination instead of bullied out of her costume.

Yes, I did make the ballet tutus for the doll and puppy myself.

Order a copy of Matching Costumes, a fun picture book about creativity and determination perfect for infants through Kindergarten today. Amazon or through the publisher's website. In hardcover and paperback.

Replacing the Autism Puzzle Pieces - Autism Awareness

8/2/2020

I learned something important today. Despite having an autistic brother and working in special education, I was unaware that the puzzle pieces used so often to promote autism awareness were problematic and being rejected by the autistic community.

This issue came up when I did a promotion of my middle grade novel, No One Needed to Know, on a Facebook group called Kids’ Books for a Better World. A person helpfully commented that the cover of my book and ad copy being heavy with puzzle pieces indicated an insensitivity to this issue. I immediately stopped what I was doing and began researching to understand my mis-step.

Sure enough, I found many articles supporting this claim and a lot of upset voices from #actualautistic people on Twitter. The history behind the puzzle pieces is unfortunate. It was originally created as a logo for Autism Speaks with the implications that autism was a puzzling disease that needed fixing. Well, as we all know, autism is a lifelong condition and doesn’t need healing or fixing.

The puzzle image concept caught on, however, and the puzzle pieces were added to a ribbon that is put on everything supportive of autism awareness. I see it everywhere with regard to trainings I’ve done and merchandise for purchase. I have shirts and a bracelet with the puzzle pieces that are intended to share my alliance as a sibling and educator.

Here are some comments I found from articles: “…the puzzle piece also represents viewing us as ‘puzzling’ or a ‘mystery’. Often terms used in the past referring to autism. For autistic people this is problematic, as we don’t wish to be viewed as akin to a puzzle that can’t be worked out.” Altogether Autism

“Autistic people reject the puzzle piece symbol for multiple reasons, but the main reasons are that it is infantilizing, it promotes the mentality that autistic people are incomplete or are missing puzzle pieces, and it treats autism as a disease that needs to be ‘treated’ or ‘cured.’ The primary colors of the autism awareness ribbon supports the misconception that autism is something that only appears in childhood, and autistic adults are largely ignored in the conversation about autism.” In the Loop about Neurodiversity

In fairness to those who, like myself, have been unaware of this growing frustration with the symbol, there are people who still view the puzzle pieces with affection and in a positive way. These two articles show some differing perspectives and how this is still a hot, unresolved issue.

https://the-art-of-autism.com/the-autism-puzzle-piece-a-symbol-of-what/

https://www.autism-society.org/about-the-autism-society/history/autism-awareness-ribbon/

The new symbol that is widely accepted is an infinity sign. It is either in rainbow colors to reflect the spectrum of the disorder or it is gold in reference to AU on the table of periodic elements.

My novel No One Needed to Know is from the perspective of an 11-year-old younger sister of a teen autistic brother. She deals with the frustrations and responsibilities of being his sister and must learn to love and appreciate her brother for who he is. Only then can she help others accept him too. Based on the theme of my novel, I need to be sensitive to the autistic community. I decided that it was time to take the puzzle pieces off of my book cover and create a new design. It’s been three-and-a-half years since the books was published, and, frankly, it needed a new cover anyway.

(I spent a lot of today redesigning and uploading the new covers. They may not be available for a couple days.)

The bikes represent Heidi and her older brother, Donald, who love to go on bike riding adventures together. I hope that you like it. I’d love to know what you think. Please leave a comment below.

You can learn more about the novel, read an excerpt and reviews, and find purchase links here.

Lost on the Water After the 4th of July - A YA Book Excerpt

7/3/2020

The steps of the courthouse is usually the big stage for the Bluegrass performances.

I was going through the listings on my TV this morning to see what would be on tonight. (I'm watching Hamilton tomorrow to celebrate the 4th of July). I saw that on the local PBS station they were going to air the annual Smithville Fiddler's Jamboree this weekend. I thought, "Oh no! Please tell me they aren't doing the Jamboree right now during Covid!" After a more in-depth search, I found out that it's all virtual this year. Thank goodness. No in-person events. This is safe, yes, but also sad. Like a lot of events cancelled this year, the Smithville Fiddler's Jamboree is a fun one. It's a craft fair centered around Bluegrass performances and competitions. It happens every year on the weekend closest to Independence Day in this small rural town near Center Hill Lake in Tennessee, a couple hours east of Nashville. I went to it one time. It was deathly hot, but it was a good time.

When I was writing Lost on the Water - A Ghost Story, I remembered the quaint town of Smithville and decided to use it as the setting. I wanted it to be a summer story, so I set the beginning of the book on Sunday, July 5th, the day after the giant event ends and the world has gone quiet and still again.

Today, I thought I'd share the opening chapter of Lost on the Water, introducing this little town and my bratty main character Dannie. (I promise she grows as a person.)

Chapter One
THE CABIN BY THE LAKE

The greatest adventure of my life happened when I was three years old, and I don’t remember any of it.

According to my mother, the one and only time we visited my grandparents’ house there was some drama about me wandering off down the road and getting lost when they weren’t looking. Their house was surrounded by woods and near a big lake, so there was a great deal of panic. They found me hours later asleep on the side of the road.

The way the story goes, when Mom woke me up, I told her I’d been following some boy. He was a big boy. Mom said I was specific about that, but she had no idea if it meant the boy was big in size or older than me. I didn’t have a lot of words then. I was mad at him, apparently, because he pushed me, and I fell into the dirt on the side of the road. I skinned my knee and started crying. I looked up to yell at the boy, “I don’t like that!” But a car zoomed by—fast. Then the boy was gone, and I thought he’d been hit by the car. I cried and cried until I fell asleep.

My parents assured me that no boy had been hit by a car. My grandparents had no idea who the boy could have been. No one lived near them. They let it all go as the active imagination of a little girl.

In the end, the incident freaked them all out so much that we never went back to visit them again. I’m still not clear on if it was my parents’ refusing to bring me back, or if it was my grandparents’ refusing to have me. Or all of the above. Whoever it was, eleven years later they finally changed their mind. Whatever was the big deal didn’t seem to bother them anymore. All worries of me chasing after invisible boys were pushed aside, because my parents decided it was perfectly fine to abandon me with Grandma for two weeks.

I secretly hoped to top that previous adventure just to spite them. I’d already been brainstorming ideas to destroy a few hours of my parents’ vacation.

“I can do it myself.”

I lunged in front of my father and yanked my suitcase off the baggage claim conveyor. The weight of it almost caused me to fall backward, but I played it off like nothing happened. I refused to look at my parents to see them covering their snide smiles. Nothing about what I was doing was “cute” or “funny.” My desire for independence wasn’t “charming.” I’d had it with them. Two hours of traffic to Los Angeles. Two hours waiting at the airport. Five hours crammed together on the plane. I was so over “family time,” and now they were telling me it would be nearly two hours again until we got to Grandma’s house out in the country. I wanted to die.

I still didn’t understand why I couldn’t have made this flight on my own. They could’ve dropped me off at the airport, and I could’ve been one of those unaccompanied minors. A bunch of my friends with divorced parents did that all the time. It would have been liberating to take this trip instead of stifling. Mom insisted she wasn’t being overprotective of me. Her reason for them tagging along with me was that she didn’t want to make Grandma drive all the way to Nashville to pick me up and have to drive back home again. It was too far, and they were asking so much of her to put me up for the next two weeks.

Put me up or put up with me?

I rolled my suitcase down to the car rental, and I shoved it in the trunk on my own. Dad could figure out how to maneuver it to make room for their baggage. I slipped into the backseat and plugged in my earbuds, so I wouldn’t have to listen to the country music oldies station my parents settled on. They didn’t even like country music, but this was, as they put it, “the good stuff ” because it was the Judds, Reba, and Randy Travis, the ones they remembered from their younger line-dancing days. Age didn’t make it better in my opinion. It was still all twang and steel guitars. I didn’t look out the window one single time until 50-plus minutes had passed, and my parents pulled off the freeway—excuse me, interstate—to stop at a gas station.

Mom told me to use the bathroom at the gas station because we wouldn’t see another toilet until we got to Grandma’s house. I didn’t listen, and she wasn’t kidding. Forty-five minutes had passed already, and there hadn’t been any more gas stations, fast food restaurants, or even a row of trees since we pulled out of that station. All I saw were fields of grass and the occasional farmhouse. Only ice was left in my thirty-two-ounce soda cup, and now I really had to pee.

“Seriously, Mom,” I squealed from the backseat. “How far into country-bumpkin land is her house? I gotta go!”

“I told you,” Mom said.

“That’s right, Dannie,” Dad chimed in. “She did tell you.”

“Could you just pull over somewhere?”

“Where?” Mom asked.

I had one of those moments when I seriously wished I was a guy, so I could just make use of my empty cup.

“We’re almost there. You’ll make it.” Dad pointed out the front window. “Oh, look, you can see the lake from here.”

I groaned. I didn’t want to see any form of water at that moment. I kept my eyes trained on my DS, trying to concentrate on my game even though I couldn’t sit still. I missed the glimpses of big, beautiful Center Hill Lake that was geography’s purpose for this remote town in Tennessee. The car slowed and stopped.

“Are we there?”

“No,” Dad said. “Stop sign. We’re entering town.”

“Stop sign?” I asked. “It isn’t even a big enough town for a stoplight?”

From my view out the window, I could see a row of small, one-story shops with their lights off and Closed signs in the windows. A page of newspaper tumbled over itself down the sidewalk in the light breeze— the only movement around. Although the scene was in full living color, if you call drab beiges, yellows and dirty whites colors, it kind of looked like the backdrop for an old black-and-white Twilight Zone episode. There are always Twilight Zone marathons on the Fourth of July, so the images were fresh in my head. I imagined that at any second that skinny guy in the suit, Rod Sterling, would come out one of those doors and let us know we were about to enter a life-changing spook story.

“Oh look!” Mom blurted out, making me jump and come way too close to wetting my pants. “How quaint! There’s a quilting store! An actual quilting store. I wish I had time to stop there.”

Okay, so that was a weird comment. Come on, Rod, I thought. Come on out and explain why my mom is behaving like she’s never been here. Interrupting Mom’s reverie, what I said out loud was, “Mom, why are you acting like all this stuff is new to you? Those shops have been here a hundred years probably.”

She cleared her throat but then didn’t say anything.

“Mom?” My dad answered for her. “Your mom didn’t actually grow up here. And she hasn’t been here too many times.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Grandma and Grandpa always spoke about this place like they’ve been here forever.”

A weird silence filled the car for a moment as we rolled down the street, as if they were trying to decide if they wanted to tell me something or avoid it. What were they keeping from me? I was about to bug them about it when something caught Mom’s eye and she was back to the passenger window again. “Oh! Look at all the antique shops!”

“You sure you don’t want to stay and vacation here? Since it’s so charming and all?”

My parents weren’t taking me to Grandma’s house for some holiday weekend. No, this was the middle of summer. A time when I should be back home in Corona Del Mar, California, riding bikes with my friends, taking the bus to the beach, having tons of fun hanging out at Fashion Island, seeing movies, playing the arcade games at the pier, and maybe taking a trip to the water park. But no. My parents were going to Paris.

“That’s Paris, France, not Paris, Tennessee.”

My dad liked that joke and told it about a hundred times to everyone he met between the LAX and Nashville airports. Dad had some business trip he had to go on, and he was taking Mom with him. “A chance of a lifetime,” they said. A chance of a lifetime for them—not me.

“Besides,” Mom went on in her defense when she insisted I couldn’t come with them, “you would hate Paris. What would you do there? It’s full of fine art museums. Couture. Fancy food. It’s not exactly pizza rolls, video games, and skateboarding over there.”

Okay, so I wasn’t exactly a fashion expert or a big fan of the pretty stuff. Let’s take my hair, for example. I kept it short-short, dirty-dishwater blonde, and never combed. In fact, I about made my mom’s hairdresser pass out when I told her I wanted “a boy’s cut.” She refused to do it, so I walked out on her. I saved up some allowance and went to one of those walk-in haircut places on my own where they gave me just the cut I wanted, trimmed over my ears, above my neck, and a touch longer on top so I had a little bit of bangs that I swept to the left. I’d been getting it trimmed every couple months ever since.

I tried makeup once, but it made my face feel dirty. My figure is about as thin, gangly, and flat-chested as they come. Mom said some girls were slower to develop a figure and not to worry about it. I was concerned for a while when all the girls changed, and I didn’t. When I hit fourteen I stopped caring. My body suited me just fine. I didn’t have to wear a bra, and I certainly didn’t deal with all those stupid boyfriend problems that Jenna, my best friend, had to go through all the time.

Still, not being built to look good in dresses didn’t mean I didn’t want to fly to Europe and eat some authentic pastries and good cheese and get a couple new T-shirts with French writing on them.

Mom’s stance on the issue of me going with them wouldn’t budge. “I’m not buying a plane ticket and spending a fortune to hear you complain the whole time. Besides, your dad and I could use some private time together.”

All right. That’s fair. But couldn’t I stay with friends at home? Jenna’s mom said it was fine with her. No. My mom had other ideas. Why don’t I have a nice visit with Grandma in Tennessee? I don’t get to see her much. Wouldn’t that be nice? She could really use the company now that Grandpa is gone.

I love Grandma. She’s pretty cool. I didn’t see her often, but she’s got this really subtle Southern accent and she knows how to play a lot of different card games. Grandpa had been awesome. I remember when he built a tree house in our backyard one time when he came to visit. From scratch—not from a kit. The tree house is still standing. I still play in it. Well, not play so much as hang out in it. Sometimes. Usually by myself lately, because a lot of my girlfriends don’t want to climb up there anymore. Splinters and bugs, you know.

Well, ever since that weird incident of me getting lost, Grandpa and Grandma always came to visit us. They said it was more convenient for them because my mom had an aunt in California, and if they came out West they could visit all of us in one trip. Auntie Brenda died a few years ago, but they still insisted on visiting us and not the other way around.

Grandpa died this past January. My parents went to the funeral, but they left me at home because they thought it would be “too much” for me to handle. I might not have been graced by puberty, but that didn’t mean I was a little kid. At any rate, with Grandpa gone, Grandma said she wouldn’t fly anymore and didn’t want to go far from home.

Kudos to my mom for trying to get Grandma to come to our house to stay with me. She explained many times about how much easier it would be to get one ticket for her than arrange three flights for us. She bribed her with offers to send her to a spa treatment and told her any kind of food we wanted could be delivered so she wouldn’t have to cook the whole time. Grandma said no. Nothing could make her ever leave Tennessee again.

Now that I was here, I wish I could understand why she felt that way. I didn’t, though. It looked boring here. Just houses and grass and a lake and a place they called a town. Apparently, they didn’t know the definition of “town” was supposed to be a place full of activity. There weren’t any cars or people visible anywhere.

“Does Grandma live close to this cosmopolitan mecca?” I asked. “Cause if not, I think I see a pizza place over there that might have a bathroom.”

Dad drove right past it. “She’s only a few miles from here. Just hang on.”

“I can change my clothes, but you may have to pay extra for the urine-soaked seats of the rental car.”

“Funny, Danielle,” Mom said.

Ooh, she used my whole name to emphasize how not funny I really was.

“Where is everybody?” I asked, squirming in my seat.

“It’s Sunday,” she said. “Shops are closed on Sundays.”

“Are you kidding me? Whoever heard of that?”

Dad laughed. “It used to be like that everywhere, Dannie. Not every place is full of heathens like where we live.”

Once we got past what Mom kept calling “The Downtown Square” we made a few turns and went uphill a bit. The view out my window got a lot greener. Trees popped up everywhere and there were houses instead of farms. I gathered we were pretty close to the water, because a lot of driveways had boats in them along with pickup trucks or SUVs with hitches. I saw some jet skis in one yard. I wondered who lived there and how I could get to know them.

Then we broke through the little smattering of houses and continued on the two-lane road up a rise. Seemingly endless amounts of tall green trees lined both sides of the road.

“Where does Grandma live, exactly?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not a house, per se,” my mom answered. “It’s a cabin.”

“A cabin?”

I wasn’t sure if that excited me or scared me. A cabin would be a cool thing if I were with my dad and some friends going camping. I pictured a rustic, old place where we’d drop our gear and collapse for the night before getting up and starting out again the following morning for some hiking, fishing, or whitewater rafting. But as a place where I’d be wasting ten days of my life with a lady in her seventies, the word “cabin” filled me with dread about the extreme lack of activity I’d be facing.

We came over a ridge, and a considerable portion of the lake came into view. It was a large body of water, but it was curvy with tons of inlets and coves forcing the water to twist and wind around them. It didn’t look like any lake I’d ever seen before.

“Are you sure that’s not a river?” I asked. “Lakes are supposed to be round. Lake Arrowhead? Lake Tahoe? Big round lakes.”

My dad slowed the car to a stop and pointed off to the left. “It’s a reservoir, Dannie. Way up that way is a dam that was built in the forties, and it caused the water to pool up here. It’s sixty-four miles long with almost four hundred fifteen miles of shoreline.”

“That’s huge!” I said. It didn’t seem that big looking at it, but I guess I wasn’t seeing the whole thing. “How do you know all that?”

“When your mom and I were here for your grandfather’s funeral, we needed a little diversion. So, one afternoon we took a tour of the dam and drove around the lake,” Dad told me.

Mom piped in then. “The whole thing is taken care of by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They own all the land around it, and there are a couple state parks for camping and hiking. You should have a good time here.”

That all sounded great except that my hiking and camping buddy was going to be an old woman. So…probably not going to happen.

Dad resumed driving again, and we went downhill toward the water.

“If the lake is owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, whatever that is, how does Grandma have a cabin here?”

“This cabin has been in my father’s family for generations, long before the dam was ever built. He managed to hang on to it, but they bought up the rest of his land from him and put some more cabins up as rental properties. During the big holiday weekends, the cabins fill up with tourists.”

She gave my dad a look then, and he rolled his eyes and shrugged in response. I’m sure that all had something to do with them trying to convince Grandma to sell her cabin or use it as a rental and make money off of it. I’d overheard a lot of that from their heated phone conversations. The walls in my house are thinner than my parents think.

The road turned parallel to the water, and I saw all the reddish log cabins. There were about twenty of them, all identical to one another, with nifty little front porches filled with rocking chairs. I noticed that some of the cabins looked like they had covered hot tubs out back. It seemed like a cozy place for a family trip. There was a small dock out in the water that I guessed all the renters were supposed to share, and the pebbled beach was wide and ready for families to set up chairs and picnics.

Down at the far end, this small beach gave over to the woods again, and that was where the one cabin that was different rested. It was not a log home in a neat, spiffy, cookie-cut design. This ranchstyle place was a little longer than the others, the logs rough and gray with age. Pretty flowers lined the front windows to each side of the wide front door, which was inviting and showed that someone lived there. However, I couldn’t see a path to the front door, making me suspect that Grandma didn’t want the tourists in the nearby cabins to come knocking.

My parents turned into the gravel driveway that sliced a wide grassy yard in half and followed it until it curved behind the house. The gravel drive faded into a rocky, overgrown backyard marked with a dozen or more trees. It struck me as weird that Grandma kept the front yard so neat and trim, while the backyard looked avoided. Maybe it was difficult to mow around the rocks and trees, but it came across as worse than that, as if she preferred it wild and ignored.

A smallish garage stood opposite the driveway from the house. I’d never seen a house that didn’t have a garage attached to it, and I thought about how inconvenient that must be for Grandma. The big green door on the front of it was down and locked with a padlock, and her car was parked on the driveway in front of it, letting me know right off the bat that the garage was not used much. At least not for her car.

A long wooden deck with a hip-high railing ran along the entire back wall of her house. It was decorated with some simple furniture, potted plants and wind chimes. And there, sitting in a worn-out, upholstered swing, was Grandma waving a glass of iced tea at us and smiling.

I had the door open and had jumped out before Dad fully stopped the car. “Love you, Grandma!” I shouted. “I’ll say hi in a minute, but I gotta find your bathroom.”

I ran past her, into the house, and heard her call after me, “Down the hall and to the right!”

I’m sure I could have figured that out. Her house wasn’t exactly big. It had a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms and one bathroom between them. However, her directions kept me from having to think, so I did as she said. A moment later, I felt a lot better and was able to smile and think again. I returned to my family a whole different person.

Except for the fact that I still didn’t want to be there. Grandma had poured everyone a glass of her “sweet tea,” and they were all seated around her picnic table. She gave me a glass, and I plopped down on the squeaky swing with the faded yellow upholstery. One sip made me gag slightly. I couldn’t believe how sweet the tea actually was. It was like drinking a piece of melted sugar cane. And though it may sound strange coming from a fourteen-year-old kid, I didn’t like it. While I listened to my parents catch up with Grandma and show her pictures from their brochures of all the places they were going to visit, I twirled the ice around in my glass until it melted.

The creaking of the swing helped me tune out their voices. I’d heard all about the Louvre and Notre Dame and the Arch de Triomphe a thousand times and didn’t care to hear about them again. Somewhere in the distance I could make out a motor running. I tried to see where it was coming from, but the wooden railing of the porch was in my way. I stood up and leaned on it, gazing out at the backyard. A forest of trees wrapped around the back of the garage like a cloak. More trees stood like a troop of guards at the far end of her wild lot, attempting to block the way down to the lake.

One of those many bends in the river-ish lake went right around her property. Between the trees, I could see only the tiniest swath of deep blue water from where I was standing. It was almost as if the overgrown grass and trees were purposely arranged to block my view. No matter how far I leaned forward, I couldn’t get a better angle to see more. The motor sound grew louder. I wanted to see what kind of boat it was.

Then, as though someone read my mind and wanted to help me out, some of the tree branches blocking my view spread apart. It was just like if someone had grabbed them and pulled them aside for me. It could have been a breeze, but I didn’t feel one. Also, if it had been a breeze, the branches would have snapped back in place after a second. These held open for a solid moment, long enough for me to clearly see a speedboat whip by.

Oh, sweet! One of her neighbors had a speedboat!

I jumped over the rail and started running down to the shore to see it.

But Grandma’s shrill cry made me stop in my tracks.

“Dannie! Dannie, don’t go down there!”

I hope you enjoyed that opening to my novel. The pictures are of the actual town of Smithville (where I've done a couple booksignings) and Center Hill Lake (where I wish I was on a boat right now). If you're intrigued and want to read more, my publisher has the book temporarily enrolled with Kindle Unlimited. The ebook is only $2.99 or you can get it for free if you're a KU member. You can also order a paperback copy at Amazon, Lulu or through the indie bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville. Find all those links, another excerpt, and reviews here.

Have a great holiday weekend. Stay safe. Wear your mask when you go out. Leave a comment if you'd like to let me know how you're spending your holiday.

A Not-Going-to-Prom Excerpt from All the Love You Write, a YA Sweet Romance Novel

4/9/2020

The other night I was watching an episode of The Good Doctor where a girl was going to miss her prom because she had cancer. Once the doctors were out of earshot, one of them quipped, "Prom sucks," and it made me laugh really hard.

He was right. Prom wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Not for me anyway. That's me with the very short black hair in the black dress with all my girlfriends at my senior prom in 1987. That was one of the very rare moments I actually spent with my friends that evening. My boyfriend at the time was in a different clique than my Drama group, so I spent most of the evening with a bunch of people I didn't know or like very well. (Shockingly, he and I broke up a couple weeks later.)

And yet, I do know how important going to prom feels. I've helped both stepdaughters and my own daughter get gussied up and pictures taken for various proms. So much excitement and anticipation. They were all gorgeous, every time. And, let's face it, the dress, shoes, hair, and makeup really is the point, isn't it?

Oh, in case you're wondering, the doctors didn't remain jerks on the The Good Doctor. They arranged for the girl to have her own private prom at the hospital with her boyfriend the night before her surgery. It was very sweet.

My heart aches for all the high school kids who can't go to prom right now. Whether it was going to be the hopeful dream come true or the disappointing, "I can't believe I spent so much money on this," it's an experience that doesn't come around again. I wish I could help like those doctors on the TV show and give everyone a special moment. Alas, I cannot. All I can do is share a prom night scene from my YA romance novel All the Love You Write for you to enjoy.

This scene is pretty far into the book, so I can't share too much of it without giving away spoilers. I can tell you that Bethany and Mark are high school seniors who have been struggling with a new relationship all semester. There are two ghosts in this story meddling with the relationship. Eileen is the ghost that constantly tries to make Bethany feel that she's not good enough for Mark. It works, which is why Bethany is spending prom night at home with her best friend Kat, having an anti-prom sleepover. Kat has just fallen asleep after a long heart-to-heart chat...

I watched Kat sleep for a bit. She looked so peaceful, and I wondered what she might be dreaming about. I knew I’d never guess correctly because despite knowing her nearly my whole life, I realized I didn’t know her as well as I thought. How could I not have seen it? How could I not have guessed? Why hadn’t she trusted me enough to tell me until now? Here I’d been thinking she was a horrible friend to me over the past few months, but maybe I was being just as horrible to her.

Hopefully we’d broken through a barrier and we could be more face value than we’d ever been before. What an amazing friendship we could have now if we tried a little harder.

Her phone on the table buzzed. A text message. It wasn’t my business, but we did know all the same people so I picked it up. If it was her mom or something, I’d wake her.

All I saw when I turned the phone over in my hand was the image of Mark and Sadie dancing again. I closed out of the picture and opened her text messages. Nope. Nothing new.

The phone vibrated in my hand. The picture popped up again.

This wasn’t funny. Why would Lissy send this picture over and over again? That wasn’t like her. Besides, by now she was probably at a prom after party—hopefully staying out of trouble. I shivered with new worries. I closed the picture.

The phone buzzed and the picture reappeared.

I closed it.

The phone buzzed and the picture reappeared.

Oh no. This wasn’t Lissy’s doing at all.

“Eileen,” I whispered sharply through gritted teeth. This had to be her handiwork. Although I couldn’t imagine how the ghost knew how to manipulate a cell phone. I closed the picture. It reappeared. “Okay, rub it in. He went to the dance with someone else. I get it. Thank you.” I closed the picture.

It reappeared.

I breathed slowly through my nose. “I know you’re trying to tell me something. What is it?”

There wasn’t any kind of response, so all I could do was study the picture again. I went past noticing how handsome he was in his uniform and how Sadie had this Cinderella Ball makeover thing happen to her. I enlarged his face to study his smile to see if it was genuine. Seemed to be. It was hard to tell. Did he like being with Sadie? Did he like her more than being with me? Was that what Eileen was getting at?

“Sadie’s an okay girl, I guess,” I admitted. Then I wondered something about Eileen. I looked up at the ceiling. I don’t know why I thought her ghost would be hovering above me like that. For all I knew she was sitting next to me on the sofa or standing on the coffee table. “Did you and Joe ever go to prom? I know you probably couldn’t go your senior year because of the war, but did you go your junior year or anything?”

The photo on the phone began to disintegrate. My heart started beating so fast as I worried Kat’s phone had some horrible virus. The screen went blank.

“Oh no. Oh no,” I moaned.

After a moment, the screen brightened again, and the image had been replaced with a new one. I’d never seen this picture before, but I had no doubts about what it was. Eileen wore a creamy white sundress with strings that tied around her neck. The cotton was thin, and although it hung all the way to the grass they stood in, I could see her legs through it. She held a bouquet of daisies in her hand and wore a crown of them in her golden hair. Beside her, Joe wore a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tucked into a pair of pale blue, bell-bottom slacks. He wore a thin tie, and he had a daisy pinned to his shirt pocket. His brown hair was overgrown. Perhaps he’d been letting it grow as long as possible before he had to report for duty. Otherwise, his face was the spitting image of Mark. Both of them were barefooted. This had to be a wedding picture of Joe and Eileen.

In my ear I heard a soft voice say, “We did better than dance.”

The phone went dead in my hand.

I hope you enjoyed that excerpt. If you're intrigued enough to find out what happens between Mark, Bethany and the ghosts, please get yourself a copy of All the Love You Write. It's free for Kindle Unlimited users. Another novel I know of that has an "anti-prom" scene is The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner. I highly recommend it, but have some tissues handy. Do you know of any other YA books with grat prom or anti-prom scenes? I'd love to know about them. Please leave a comment below.

The World in a Day - a Free Short Story

3/23/2020

In this crazy time where most of us are sequestered to our homes and going a little stir crazy, I thought I'd share a short story I wrote about a mom who gets a fresh outlook and invents a way for her family to have a really good day together. It's a feel-good piece that I wrote when I was still living in California, and I cleaned it up today for you.

Everywhere I looked I could see them. On the walls, in the shelves, above the mantel, even attached to refrigerator magnets. Pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Dean Morgan on their exotic vacations. According to their photographic exhibit, these two had been all over the world, to every fascinating destination one could imagine.

The cocktail party at the Morgan’s house quickly grew tiring. I didn’t think I could handle hearing another tale of finding off-the-beaten-track sights or staying at lovely bed and breakfasts with gorgeous views and splendid hospitality. Watching my husband, Craig, nod his head over and over again, then hearing him repeat, “We’ll have to check that out when we go,” made my stomach tighten. A world of bills, responsibilities, children, and tight schedules swirled around me, making me desperate for some fresh air.

“Let’s go outside and see the garden,” I said to Craig, tugging on his arm.

“I’m sure it’s precious.” I felt certain that some of my bitterness escaped with that sentence, but neither Mr. or Mrs. Morgan seemed to notice.

“Oh, do have a look,” Mrs. Morgan said. “All of the Birds of Paradise were imported from Fiji.”

I smiled as politely as I could and tugged my husband away, pausing only to refill my wineglass on the way out.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I said as we stepped into the tropical garden of imported flowers probably kept up by imported gardeners. “They make me feel like the most boring person on earth. Do you realize that I’ve never been out of the country? Not even to Tijuana or Vancouver. I haven’t even been to Hawaii!”

Craig put his arm around me and gave me one of his comforting squeezes that hurt sometimes when he does it too hard. This was one of those times. “We could go somewhere if you want.”

“Really?” I asked. “Where? When will we have the time or money?”

“Um…” he hummed. He always did that when he had no answer. “We could always win a trip from the grocery store sweepstakes.”

I felt my eyes roll up into my head. “Can we leave before I hear any more stories about hidden paradises?”

Craig agreed, and ten minutes later we walked out the front door with this haunting farewell to follow us: “Let’s do it again,” Mrs. Morgan suggested.

“Yes,” Craig agreed, adding, “but at our house next time.”

*****

We argued all the way home. We argued into the night. The “How could you say thats” and “What do you means” went round and round for hours.

Finally, exasperated from it all, I muttered, “I just can’t bear for them to see that we have no life.”

“But we do have a life, honey,” he assured me. “Look at our pictures. We have tons of them.” He pointed at framed pictures around our bedroom. “There’s us with the kids at that massive family reunion picnic at the lake. There’s the one of Kelly’s pony ride at the fair. Remember this one, when Kenny graduated from kindergarten?” He pulled the picture off the dresser and put it in my hands. It was one of my favorites, little Kenny standing there in his oversized gown, wearing a cap made out of cardboard and black construction paper. We called him, “our little scholar.”

“It’s not that,” I told Craig. “I didn’t even notice our lives were lacking anything until standing in the Morgan’s house with this constant reminder that there is a world out there—a world we haven’t seen even the slightest piece of.”

At that, Craig threw up his hands. “Well, I don’t know what to do about that.”

We turned out the lights and went to sleep without saying another word to each other.

*****

In the morning, after feeding the kids and sending them outside to play, I cozied up with the Sunday Times on the couch. Purposely, I hid the Travel section from myself and instead pulled out the Calendar. I thought I might find a carnival or kids’ show that we could go to that day to ease my mind and give us all something to do. Glancing through the events pages, I came across an advertisement for Huntington Gardens.

According to the ad, this was a huge garden in Pasadena designed painstakingly by the best groundskeepers in the nation. Plants were brought in from all over the world and raised in environments that resembled their foreign habitats. Kind of like a zoo for flora. Supposedly, if I went there, I would see a Japanese tea garden, a Chinese bamboo forest, a New Zealand jungle, and a Moroccan desert.

This gave me an idea.

Within an hour the family was packed into the car along with a couple duffel bags full of hats, sunglasses, some changes of clothes, and a camera. Craig thought I was crazy at first, but he soon got into the spirit of it. After all, my plan was anything but boring.

We spent the whole afternoon exploring the garden. Each time we found the perfect location, we’d call on some stranger to snap pictures of us standing there. I put Kelly in charge of wardrobe, Kenny took care of making sure no people stood in the background, Craig was in charge of finding the best angles, and I just had a great time.

At the end of the day, exhausted but giggly, we headed over to the convenience store and uploaded our digital pictures into the kiosk and clicked the box to have them developed in one hour. We ate at the burger place across the street and waited for our pictures to develop. As the sixtieth minute passed, we raced over to tear open our results. The pictures couldn’t have been more perfect.

*****

A few weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Dean Morgan came to our house, along with some other work friends, for a get-together. Our new “worldly” pictures hung on the walls, rested on bookshelves and the mantel above the fireplace, and a couple sillier ones were held in place by refrigerator magnets.

Mrs. Morgan ogled a pose of Kelly and I standing in front of a Zen rock garden. “Isn’t Japan wonderful in the summer?”

“Quite,” I agreed, sipping my wine to keep from giggling.

“And Australia,” Mr. Morgan said, studying another picture. “You really had to take one of the hidden trails to get this shot, didn’t you?”

“The kids loved it,” Craig replied, winking at me.

Originally, I had only planned to put those pictures up for the cocktail party, just for the purpose of impressing the Morgans. After the party, though, I decided to leave them up.

As I look at them now, I realize that although we may have fooled our jet-set friends, the photos would never fool me. I’d never look at them and think, “Wow, look where we’ve been.” Instead, I’d always look at those photos and remember how much fun we had together as a family, right here in our own home town, traveling around the world in a day.

I hope you enjoyed that short story. I have other ones in my blog if you feel like scrolling down a bit. You might also enjoy my short story "Ticket to Her Heart" published in the anthology Second Chance for Love. Please take a moment to pop around on my website and read excerpts and reviews of my published work. You might find something to help you pass the time.

All my best wishes for you,
Donna

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Author D. G. Driver's
Write and Rewrite Blog

“There are no bad stories, just ones that haven’t found their right words yet.”

A blog mostly about the process of revision with occasional guest posts, book reviews, and posts related to my books.